Only one resort from any single shared ownership that uses similar navigation structures (Vail, Intrawest, etc.)

I have to find it on the website, no social profiles.

Count total pages viewed from my actual experience, not the actual shortest distance between two points.

Clock starts when I click their URL, not after the page loads.

I’d first try to find the hours on the home page before clicking to another.

After a half an hour I had my data.

Good & Bad
Here’s how it looks.

Average pages viewed (including home page): 2.5

Average time to find hours (in seconds): 21

Resorts with hours on home page (or every page): 1

Longest series / time: 287 seconds / 16 pages

Shortest series / time: 5 seconds / 1 pages

Let me also note that I did NOT include two resorts whose hours I never actually found. On both I went through over 20 pages looking for the hours and came up empty.

Those pages included zooming in on trail maps, internal site searches, and any other straws I grasped at after spending 5+ minutes of their sites.

Remember
Now, keep in mind that I’ve looked a hundreds of resort websites thousands of times, so I’m not exactly a perfect subject to study. And after finding hours on a dozen or so sites, I realized I was getting slightly better at knowing where to look, so treat those numbers as low estimates.

But as I started going through the site I realized the same question could be asked of a number of things:

Today’s snow report

Web cams

Directions to the resort

Parking options

The list goes on. I don’t have time to find averages for each, but the only number that really matters is yours and your site analytics likely have the answer. With seasons starting up left and right this week, might be worth a look.

Was I one of those tweets? I know I’ve complained about it before on SM. It’s my pet peeve of ski resort web design. That and resort sites that don’t have a basic large jpeg trail map. Most of the time, I don’t want an “interactive” map. :)

Absolutely, Eric. In fact, I tried to track down one of your tweets so I could embed it couldn’t seem to find one.

WisSkier

As I tweeted in response this is a lesson many website designers or those guiding the design need to learn. I’m running short on time and I’m out and about, I’m on my device, bandwidth is dodgy, I have only time to visit one place, and I need to know if you are open or not. The first place I can find hours for wins the contest.

Put your hours, address, and phone on top so I can see it easily on my device or on my laptop.

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